Existential Dread Quotes

“What could I say? Maybe this: the man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present instant of his flight; he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future; he is wrenched from the continuity of time; he is outside time; in other words, he is in a state of ecstasy; in that state he is unaware of his age, his wife, his children, his worries, and so he has no fear, because the source of fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear.”
― Milan Kundera, Slowness

“...all normal expectations went by the board and one’s daily habits were disrupted by a sense of ever-spreading all-consuming chaos which rendered the future unpredictable, the past unrecallable and ordinary life so haphazard that people simply assumed that whatever could be imagined might come to pass, that if there were only one door in a building it would no longer open, that wheat would grow head downwards into the earth not out of it, and that, since once could only note the symptoms of disintegration, the reasons for it remaining unfathomable and inconceivable, there was nothing anyone could do except to get a tenacious grip on anything that was still tangible…”
― László Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance

“I'm going to die and my son farts in my face... what a waste!”
― Marjane Satrapi, Chicken with Plums

“Curiosity killed the existential dread.”
― Erica Alex, Cake in the Blackbird Stew

“I know how lucky I am, stupid with luck, crammed with it, stumbling drunk. I wake sometimes in the dark terrified by my life’s precariousness, its thready breath.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“Estranged mountains bulged under the sky, the big sky, the endless sky. Anyway, no one could see an end to it, which reassured her, since so much seemed to be coming to an end. It felt that way.

But it seemed impossible---the universe dropping off, ending, there would be an end, and then there would be nothing, a no more, a vacuum of no more. Her imagination couldn’t let her go there.”
― Lynne Tillman, The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories

“Ouija Board Web by Stewart Stafford

Someone's been in my room,
Helped themselves to my beer.
Bottled my portal to escape,
And left behind a sober fear.

I guess I'll climb the silence,
To the mirror, if I'm still here,
Tap out a drowning rhythm,
To send an S.O.S. so clear.

A phantom knocking from within,
Coins rub my spirit board away,
Voices say breathe out and in,
Darkest night blurs into day.

Moth to the flame in a spider web,
Mummified to twist in the draught,
Here comes the eight-eyed sentinel,
To finish its ice-cold Arachnid craft.

© 2025, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“She added in a tight, defensive voice that she panicked when she did jobs, it gave her existential panic. She could do them for a while, but it felt like darning socks in a burning building. Time was running out and . . . Did he ever get that?”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“So they held hands and waited for sleep, and tomorrow they would wake up, still two complex organisms, big animals with too-big brains, aware of the pointlessness of everything but willing, or at least not yet unwilling, to attend to it all anyway.”
― Hadley Moore

“Nobody really worries much about what is going to happen millions of years hence. Even if they think they are worrying about that, they are really deceiving themselves. They are worried about something much more mundane, or it may merely be a bad digestion; but nobody is really seriously rendered unhappy by the thought of something that is going to happen to this world millions and millions of years hence. Therefore, although it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out -- at least I suppose we may say so, although sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation -- it is not such as to render life miserable. It merely makes you turn your attention to other things.”
― Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects

“Treacle looked interested. "I used to think like that too--get caught up in the endless cycle of crushing despair and existential dread. Now I'm starting to see it a little like this jawbreaker. Terrible on the outside. But if you get a little deeper? Still terrible. But below that? Terrible. But eventually you get to a point where it isn't terrible. At least I think so. I haven't made it that far yet. Point is, it can't be all bad. Probably. Unless it is. Oh no...I'm starting to feel the existential dread coming on again. We're all doomed, aren't we, Inga?”
― James Hunter, Shadowcroft Academy for Dungeons

“He kills the stars.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Borne

“Despite my substantial efforts, I have failed to find another soul. We have all scattered far and wide into the vastness of this space and cannot find another. I suspect by now we are all alone.”
― Steven L. Peck, A Short Stay in Hell

“Hell isn’t beneath us—it’s stitched into the fabric of this world, disguised as life. I didn’t want to vanish—I just didn’t want to rot unheard.”
― Jonathan Harnisch, Sex, Drugs, and Schizophrenia

“I exist inside a living hell — not a nightmare, but an unrelenting, screaming abyss with no exit. I am cursed beyond redemption, haunted by horrors that claw at my soul, and possessed by something monstrous that wears my face and mocks my every scream. Every second is torture — not pain, but a divine punishment etched into my bones, burning through my nerves, flooding my skull with fire. I am not alive. I am a condemned vessel, dragged through a waking exorcism that never ends.”
― Jonathan Harnisch

“I never wished I’d lived. I just rot beneath the paranoid delusion of angels—watching, judging, doing nothing.”
― Jonathan Harnisch, Sex, Drugs, and Schizophrenia

“Let the ominous one find me,
not to visit, but to finish.
Brief, brutal,
a silence carved from screams.

Let the lock stay open,
the air thick with rot and mercy.
No more rehearsals of shame,
no more days on this damned spinning rock.

I've already died,
but I wake too often.
Let tonight be the last mistake.
Let nothing ever come after.”
― Jonathan Harnisch, The Dreamer Sleeps Without Dreaming

“He doesn’t lock the door anymore—not out of courage, but quiet desperation. Each night, he lies there, hollowed and waiting, hoping a stranger might cross the threshold and finish the story he can’t bring himself to end. It isn’t bravery. It’s surrender in disguise. He doesn’t wish for peace, not even sleep—just an ending that isn’t authored by his own hand. A final act. A random mercy. That’s all he asks.”
― Jonathan Harnisch, Sex, Drugs, and Schizophrenia

“You don't know horror until you've spent a few hours inside a hospital looking at the fitful sleep of a loved one who is being taken from you. You don't know desperation until the uselessness of praying hits you.”
― Gabino Iglesias, The Devil Takes You Home

“The most dangerous grave is the one you carry alive.”
― Pierre Lagrenat

“Full schedules, empty hearts. Maxed-out memory, corrupted essence.”
― Phoenix Moon, Emotional Roller Coaster: Confessions of a soul reborn from the ashes

“Toda su vida ha estado así, piensa. Piensa que desde que tiene memoria se encuentra con el cañón de un arma en la nuca. No aguanta más.”
― Guillermo Saccomanno, El oficinista

“We were all going to do. There was no way out. We fluttered like drowning moths.”
― Scott Pearce, The Rider on the Bridge

“We were all going to die. There was no way out. We fluttered like drowning moths.”
― Scott Pearce, The Rider on the Bridge

“Summer really is over. In a moment, it'll start raining, then be Christmas, then a whole new year. Lately, time seems to move like that, like as soon as I get my hand firmly around a moment, it has turned to dust and there's a new moment to try and grasp.”
― Emma Pattee, Tilt